A Catholic U.S.?

"Can Catholicism win America? The question is of great importance to Rome. The lengthening shadow of the Kremlin has fallen across St. Peter's. . . . Anticlerical revolution threatens Spain. . . . Latin America is seething with unrest.... In all the Roman Catholic world the only place where the wealth and stability of the church are not threatened is in the United States. Without its American resources and power the world outlook for Catholicism would be black indeed."

This quotation is the payoff of an eight-week series of articles, ending this week, in the Christian Century, Protestantism's most important interdenominational journal. Their implication is that the U.S. may some day become a Catholic nation.

The articles were written by the Christian Century's able field editor, short, blond-mustached Harold Edward Fey (rhymes with pie), 46, an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ Church. Editor Fey spent two years digging up the facts & figures to document his detailed series on the how and why of Catholic strength.

The Catholic Church is now not only the biggest single U.S. denomination (Fey's figure: 22,945,247 communicants), but is also a public influence to which everyone from politicians to newspaper editors pays heed. The secret, says Fey, is the church's time-tested genius for building an organization strong enough and agile enough to work its way into every area of American culture. In education, says Fey, the church has control over some 2,500,000 students in 9,000 parochial schools and Catholic high schools; in religion it is daily proving its ability to win halfhearted Protestants into the fold.

Some months ago, Fey relates, an elaborate trailer chapel, equipped with loudspeakers and a group of priests, moved into a small Ohio town which had no Catholic Church. For a week the priests preached at night and called on the citizenry by day. Soon a Catholic missioner settled in the town, established a church, got a nucleus of 40 families for his parish. Then he bought 160 acres of land, subdivided it, sold the plots to Catholic families. Result: a community that was once nearly 100% Protestant may be well on the road to Catholicism.

From his investigations, Fey deduces that the objective of the Roman Catholic Church is to establish itself as the state church of the U.S. This goal is bound to be achieved, he thinks, unless Protestantism ends its divisions and its bickerings, and establishes a "comparable unity of effort ... to recover and maintain the responsibility which it once carried for the character of American society."

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The Fey articles have brought few reactions from the Catholic press. After only three articles had been published, the Commonweal, liberal Catholic weekly, commented: "Mr. Fey . . . fails to distinguish between [Catholic] agencies . . . which are active and those which are largely paper organizations. . . . The Fey articles are not excited in tone but his material thus far published merely skims the surface."

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